in Transvaal where gold seams were discovered in 1874—marked South Africa’s labor market’s influence on the growth of the suburbs of Lourenço Marques.7 The city’s outskirts, which also included the Malanga, Malhangalene, and São José de Lhanguene neighborhoods, were made up of roads and paths that recognized and respected local mobility needs.
In Lourenço Marques, where various types of spatial and social stratification coexisted, the main border was the one separating the so-called cement city from the suburbs, also called the caniço (lit., reed—the building material of most suburban houses). The circunvalação (ring) road, built in 1903, represented this line of demarcation both physically and symbolically. The urban structure imposed by Plano Araújo determined how the city would grow, something that is noticeable even in the early twenty-first century.
MAP 2.1. Lourenço Marques and its suburbs, 1907–8. This is one of the first representations to include both the cement city and its periphery. Source: Centro de Estudos Geográficos. Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território.
MAP 2.2. General plan of the city and harbor of Lourenço Marques, 1926. This map shows a more common representation of the cement city’s modern structure, considered by the colonial mind as the “proper city,” the one made by the Portuguese—the “civilized” city, with its rational design and geometry. Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
In 1971, Mozambican architect “Pancho” Guedes described the main characteristics of the caniço:
Every city and small town in Mozambique is surrounded by caniços. They are the towns’ out-buildings—the places where servants and laborers live. The word caniço means reed; in southern Mozambique reeds are the traditional building material most frequently used for walling and screens whenever they are available in the rural areas. . . . The caniços range from villages scattered around small towns, to vast slums and shanty towns made up of many quarters surrounding the larger towns and cities. In the small towns the caniços adjoin land where maize, manioc and other crops and fresh vegetables are grown. The sites they occupy are as close as possible to the town. Some are even located within the towns themselves, occupying land which has not been developed because it was low-lying and subject to flooding, or because of its irregular or steep configuration. In Lourenço Marques some of the caniços occupy the edges of an old lagoon; they are subject to floods and heavy rain, and are quite close to the main part of town.8
Coming from the countryside, a great portion of the population built their houses with traditional techniques, using tree trunks, branches, bamboo, grass, and various fibers and clays.9 Technologic innovation improved the quality of the housing. The poorer population and migrant workers occupied fragile huts, which were built with burlap bags and tin cans.10 This kind of construction was replaced by better-equipped houses. Near the end of the colonial period, when more than two hundred thousand people lived in the larger suburbs, most houses (88 percent) were rectangular, covered with zinc, “with reed or wattle walls, daubed or bare, or made of zinc or cement blocks, houses with yards surrounded by reeds with a kitchen porch, the bath fence and latrine and other rudimentary facilities.”11 At the time, the masonry houses (a mere 6 percent) were owned by the local privileged class.
The city was the symbol of a new era of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Portugal’s sovereignty over the territory became clearer. The definition of borders, traced during the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and ratified in 1891, was a result of the balance of power that emerged out of the conflicts between the main colonial actors. Portugal’s role in this new stage of colonial expansion was inevitably hampered by its structural condition. During the 1890s, unable to effectively set up a local administrative apparatus, it surrendered a great deal of the Mozambican territory to large foreign capital companies (companhias majestáticas). Controlling native labor became the main colonial goal, something that was in line with a history of occupation that had been sustained by the commercialization and exploitation of slave labor.12 A succession of labor codes (1892, 1899, 1911, and 1914) categorized the types of work to which Africans were subjected: forced, voluntary, correctional, due to vagrancy, due to law infringement. “Native” labor was regulated by institutions such as the Intendência dos Negócios Indígenas e Emigração (Superintendency of Native and Emigration Affairs), which worked in liaison with the governor general from 1903 onward and would, in 1907, become the Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas (Office of Native Affairs). A disciplinary control model flourished, enacted by laws imposing IDs, as well as residency, labor, and travel permits, upon native people.13 Failure to abide by these procedures brought the imposition of forced-labor regimes, locally known as chibalo.14 Chibalo sustained not only state initiatives but also private enterprises, both of which benefited from the political and economic protection of the power structure. These means of recruitment were used to engage factory workers as well as the great mass of domestic servants that worked in the city center. High-ranking colonizers soon criticized the large number of male African domestic servants in Lourenço Marques as a sign of economic underdevelopment, which demonstrated the Portuguese incapacity to exploit the African working force in a rational manner.15
FIGURE 2.1 Gorjão wharf and railway lines, Lourenço Marques. The photo provides evidence of the economic role that the city had in the regional economy, led by the industrial development of South Africa. Photos mainly by H. Graumann and I. Piedade Pó, void of copyright as collective work. Scan of original book from Memórias d’África e d’Oriente, Aveiro University. Source: Wikimedia.
Beginning in the 1870s, criticism directed against Portuguese liberal legislation’s16 notion of egalitarian assimilation reflected the need for the domination stage to come to be framed by new ideological, political, and legislative instruments. Based on a set of social-Darwinist principles, the control and categorization of the native population changed the indefinite category of selvagem (savage) to the more manageable indígena (native).17 The “civilizing mission,” which ideologically justified Portugal’s presence in Africa, was based on a set of laws that distinguished the rights and duties of the indígenas from those of the “civilized.” Portugal’s colonial regime also admitted the existence of a third category of individuals, known as assimilados (assimilated), those who, having proven their adaptation to European civilization and “Portuguese culture,” began to enjoy the rights of the “civilized.” In Mozambique the first law that defined who would be classified as an indígena was published in 1894 and aimed to regulate the application of penalties of compulsory labor in public works.18 In 1909 a decree regulating land concessions introduced the “color variable,” meaning nonwhite, as a feature of the definition of indígena.19 In 1917 an edict by Mozambique’s governor general passed into law the distinction between indígena (native), não indígena (nonnative), and assimilado (assimilated).20 This edict established the prerequisites to obtain a document (alvará do assimilado) that would serve as proof of a new status. A less rigid version of this law was approved in 1927.21 Until 1961 the administrative management of the Lourenço Marques suburbs fell upon the traditional administrative authorities, divided into four hereditary ruling councils, turned into regedorias: São José (which included the areas of São José, Chamanculo, and Malanga), Munhuana (Munhuana and Zixaxa), Fumo (Fumo, Polana, Mavalane, Chitimela, and Infulene), and Malhangalene (Malhangalene, Mafalala, and Lagoas).
Portugal’s colonial system, reliant on a supposedly evolutionist conception, did
